Breakthrough Generation Fellowship

by Valerie Cleland on November 19, 2012

Generation is Breakthrough Institute’s young leaders initiative, founded in 2007 to foster the development of a new generation of thinkers and writers capable of finding pragmatic new solutions to today’s greatest challenges in the areas of energy, economy, and environment.

Every summer from June to August, Generation offers a small number of paid, highly competitive, ten-week fellowships to recent college graduates and postgraduates from around the world.

The first two weeks are dedicated to Breakthrough Bootcamp, an intellectual crash course involving intensive reading, writing, and an expert lecture series designed to provide a grounding in the broad-spectrum thinking that informs Breakthrough’s policy agenda. Topics covered include modernization theory, social psychology, aspirational politics and philosophy, economics and innovation policy, and technology policy.

Breakthrough Fellows were invited to tour the Advanced Light Source (ALS) research facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories in August 2012.

For the remainder of the fellowship, fellows work in small teams divided between three program areas: Energy & Climate, Conservation & Development, and Economic Growth & Innovation. Supervised by policy staff, fellows produce policy white papers, reports, and memos. Previous projects (for a full list, click here) have been featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, Time Magazine, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Law and Policy Journal, among others, as well as in Congressional testimony.

In addition to research and analysis, fellows attend the Breakthrough Dialogue – a superb opportunity to interact with the wider Breakthrough community as well as attend talks, debates, and working groups within Breakthrough’s different program areas. Throughout the summer, fellows are offered a range of visits to other think tanks and institutions in the Bay Area, as well as social events and a weekend camping trip.

Over 50 young experts and analysts have completed Generation since its inception in 2007 and moved on to important positions in government, academia, and the nonprofit sector. Together with career support from the Breakthrough staff and the wider network of Senior Fellows and associates, the fellowship makes for many avenues to embark on an exciting career. To see what some of the former fellows are doing now, click here.

To apply for the 2013 Breakthrough Generation fellowship, click here. Please note the deadline for applications is February 28, 2013.